For two days (April 7 and 8) this week, The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration held sway at the Washington DC Convention Center. This year’s 2009 Annual Energy Conference included ten panel sessions on various current energy hot topics. These sessions began following an early morning plenary session with a keynote address given by Dr. Steven Chu, the newly appointed Secretary of Energy for the United States. Several hundred people filled the meeting room to capacity to hear Dr. Chu. The next speaker, Yale University Professor William Nordhaus, discussed energy and the macro economy and then EXELON’s Chairman and CEO, Mr. John Rowe spoke on energy in a carbon-constrained world.
The first day session of most interest to me was the session entitled: Electric Power Infrastructure: Status and Challenges for the Future. The EIA’s Scott Sitzer moderated a lively and informative panel comprised of the FERC’s P. Kumar Agarwal, Dr. Tim Brennan from UMBC, and NERC’s Mark Lauby. The three panel members came at the infrastructure issues from different backgrounds, perspectives and approaches, but each hit home on at least a few of the key electric power issues confronting the nation, and indeed, the entire world.
Mr. Agarwal discussed FERC’s recent activities that have resulted in the processing of 30 applications for 8,000 miles of new HV and EHV transmission lines worth an estimated $20 billion in capital investment. The approval process was aided by FERC’s new authority to grant incentives for transmission developers, as provided in Section 219 of the 2005 EPACT legislation. In summary, this section of the law provides for the granting of financial incentives to promote transmission investments that will help ensure reliability and reduce the costs of delivering power by reducing transmission congestion.
Mark Lauby discussed the role of the North American Electric Reliability Council as the ERO – the electric reliability organization for the United States – with oversight provided by FERC. The speaker reviewed the emerging issues confronting NERC working units ranging from transmission modernization, planning tools and static and dynamic tools for system operators, to the demand side (demand response, hazardous weather impacts, et al) and to the supply side (issues of keeping the system in balance to retain high systems reliability). Mr. Lauby reinforced the notion that wind farms are not simply farms in the traditional sense, but are indeed power generation “plants” regardless of size – if they are to be integrated into the power grid (wind resource integration). He also referred to the issues that differentiate operations from planning (and systems operators from systems planners).
Dr. Brennan discussed the issues of deregulation, the feasibility of committing to open electricity markets, the issues of reliability versus competition vis-a-vis open market developments and related topics in a manner that the audience understood clearly.
The follow-on Q and A portion of the afternoon session brought about intense discussions of the California debacle of the 1990’s, the impact of EISA legislation, the importance of developing energy storage to scale needed in the future, and whether some of the billions of dollars being allocated in electric systems development should be diverted from transmission to distributed generation.
All in all, this turned out to be a very worthwhile session that could have continued for another couple of hours with as much input from the audience as was generated in a short amount of time. By a quick read of the badges on the two hundred-plus attendees, there were representatives from all segments of the electric power community, from developers to utilities, to industrial and commercial consumers, equipment manufacturers, to consultants and energy law practitioners.
– Chuck Newton
summary reviews and highlights from completed studies
